Nancy's Reviews > Hacking Harvard

The title says it all. Sort of. It’s about two groups of guys who makes a bet: that they can get the senior class’s worst student ever into Harvard—by hacking into their system and getting them to Admit rather than Deny. The prize? Twenty five thousand dollars. The downfall of it all? Each team has tricks up their sleeves, and no one’s giving up the few thousand grand without a fight.

The idea is cool. The concepts behind it as well. The book mentions all this angst about getting accepted or rejected into the school, and I really agree with that. Being able to get into college, graduate from college, or even be admitted in an Ivy League shouldn’t matter all that much or take over someone’s life. There are thousands of applicants every year and they can only select some—so what happens to those who don’t get in? It’s like a slap in the face. You’ve worked so hard, and you know you can get in, but you don’t anyway. Being valedictorian doesn’t guarantee success, neither does participating in all those extracurricular activities. I mean, it sort of matters, but if you think about it, what if everyone gets good grades and joins teams? Harvard will still reject some and accept some. What makes these people so different?

This book is about how far some people will go to get in Harvard. It’s very confusing at first, because I’m still not sure what happened in the first chapter, and the narration isn’t the best technique either. Point of view is always shifting from Lex’s 1st person and then moving onto third person, so you never know what to expect. I do, however, like the twists and turns. Especially when Lex proves out to be working against Eric’s team, which I kind of suspected in the first place.

It’s not the best book I’ve read, but after I finished it, it’s made me think a lot about college and what I want. I’ve never been a Harvard person, which might come as a surprise, because how many people do you know who can honestly say they don’t want to go to Harvard? Not many. I’m still an Ivy League dreamer—Columbia or Princeton—even though I know it’s a lost cause. It’s like the high school admissions thing. I took the Stuyvesant test, even though I knew I wouldn’t get in? Why? Because my mom wanted me to, because I liked the idea of belonging to a school of everyone’s dreams. I didn’t get in. I didn’t even get accepted into Brooklyn Tech. People care too much about getting rejected by their dream school that they think they’re failures, or not good enough. And the same will happen in college. I’ll get rejected by Ivy Leagues and end up somewhere (out-of-state, hopefully) and who’s to say it won’t turn out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to me?

Now that is the whole message of the book. One I’ve already learned, but liked to be reminded again, especially since, two years from now, I’ll be writing essays and smarting interviews to try to get into a good college.